Traitor's Kiss (18 page)

“I can find more if you wish.”

“She was accused of unseemly behaviour with her brother,” I say. “Have you questioned
my
brother…the King?”

Why did I say it? I seem to have the devil in my mouth.

He is as horrified as I am. “Your vile words do you no justice, Your Grace. I advise moderation.” Tyrwhitt taps the edge of the table. “Well, we have all the time in the world, unlike those in the Tower. Let us rest. I shall go to my bed and you to yours.”

I drag myself to the garden door. My bones ache.

My eyes frighten me. In the window glass, they are as shrunken as an old woman's.

It is Tyrwhitt's habit to bait me when I have almost escaped. As I turn the handle, he says, “Whatever Mistress Ashley confesses, she has shown herself unfit to care for you, the King's sister, and she will not be allowed to return here, even if she is freed…or if you are still here.” I swallow hard, but the lump in my throat almost chokes me. “I have asked my wife to be your new companion.”

My voice trembles. “I don't want your wife. I want Kat. Send her back to me, sir.” I am crying again. I am sick of my tears, for they do not cool me. They scald my cheeks. And they make me a child, not a woman. “She's all I have, sir. Don't take her from me.”

Every tear must weaken me in Tyrwhitt's sight, for I cannot control them. Yet he is moved enough to pat my hand and summon Blanche Parry to take me to my bedchamber. By dawn, my hands and feet are swollen with dropsy.

Chapter Twenty

5 February, 1549

Tyrwhitt reeks.

The smell is on his skin, his hair, his beard – the smell of my brother's court, of music and dancing, of all the things that I miss. Although I dislike it, my feet dance.

The door – the one that leads to the Great Hall – bursts open to reveal his wife, this tall Elizabeth, elegant in her high-necked dress of dark silk, who barely curtsies in the doorway. It is her perfume I smell on his skin. He must have sent for her, although I do not want her. Her disdainful glance reminds me that I have neglected my appearance. I look down. Yes, the bodice of my dress is stained. My fingers are so swollen that I cannot wear my rings.

Tyrwhitt clears his throat. “Elizabeth…my wife, Elizabeth,” he says. “She has come to stay.”

So it is done. Kat will not come back to me now and I must bear it as best I can, although it is like torture to me. I can hardly stand.

“
Princess
Elizabeth,” I respond. I force myself upright, and smile so as to appear a young girl, although I feel like an old woman. “Welcome to my palace, madam, although I did not invite you. No doubt you are impatient to see your husband, since I have detained him far too long, as he has detained me, a prisoner in my own palace.”

“I have prayed for you, Your Grace.” She towers above me, although I stand as tall as I can.

“Why?”

Her small eyes travel up and down my swollen body. “And so has Archbishop Cranmer. He sends you a gift to bring you solace.” She hands me the most beautiful book I have ever seen. Cherubs and angels crowd its dark red cover, around golden letters:
The Book of Common Prayer
. Cranmer is my godfather and this is his great work of translation from the Latin version.

“I do not want it,” I say. “He has not been a loyal godfather to me.” I throw it onto the table. “What news from London, madam? Births, marriages…” I stop myself.

“The Act of Uniformity has been passed. By spring, everybody will have to worship from Cranmer's prayer book.”

“Not
that
sort of news, madam. I mean news from the Tower. Have you seen Mistress Ashley?”

“Yes, Your Grace. She has been moved to a more suitable room…” My heart leaps with relief. “…a more suitable room for questioning. It is the darkest room in the Tower, so dark that it is impossible to distinguish night from day. Unfortunately, there is no glass in the window. She says that she is too cold to sleep.”

I bite my lip. “Please let her have a fire. She hates the cold.
Please.
”

“Perhaps she will, one day.” Tyrwhitt smirks. “We have not had a burning at the stake for many years.”

My breath quickens. Kat has too much air in her draughty prison. I do not have enough in mine. “Open the window,
please
,” I beg.

“No!” Lady Tyrwhitt says. “An east wind is blowing today.”

Devil's breath, Kat called it.

The stench of Lady Tyrwhitt's perfume sickens me. When she escorts me back to my bedchamber, I forbid her entry. “If you are to live in my palace, madam, leave off your perfume. You smell like a cat on heat and it makes my stomach heave.”

She recoils. I thought she might slap me as you do a wilful child. But she only whispers furiously, “
You
were the cat on heat.” Then her eyes brim and she looks away from me. “I was with Lady Catherine when she died. It would have broken your heart to see her.”

I clench my teeth so tight that they tingle. I ache for my stepmother almost as much as my mother.

Taking advantage of my changed mood, she follows me into my bedchamber. “What do you want, madam?” I shift, uncomfortable.

“There is other news from London,” she begins, “…of a more delicate and private nature…and not for my husband's ears.”

“Ah –
London
news,” I reply. “You mean gossip.”

“I should tell you that this gossip has not died down, madam. Rather, it has grown. I thought that it would not settle, but melt away like first snow. But it has hardened into ice.” She pauses, pleased with her poetry, and stares at my belly. “They say that you are carrying Lord Seymour's child.”

Anger, astonishment, panic – all quicken my heartbeat and bring my voice to a breathless whisper. “Do I look as if I am with child? I have not seen my stepfather since last May Eve.”

“They say that you visited him in London, in the autumn…when he boasted of marrying you.”

The devil grips my chest again. “I did not visit him. How could I? I have been unwell ever since I left Chelsea Palace.”

“Mmm…when you left Chelsea so suddenly…that illness is the cause of the other gossip,” she continues. “It is as vile and as foul as the first, but you should know what it is…”

I push her through the door. “All gossip is foul, madam, and I have had enough to last me a lifetime.”

I take to my bed. I often do and it serves me well. But I reckon without Lady Tyrwhitt. Kat used to bring feverfew and rosemary and lavender posset. Prayer is Lady Tyrwhitt's remedy. She prays, morning, noon and night. She is everywhere, even outside my privy.

The water seeps at last from my body. I am slender once more. “As you see, madam, there is no child,” I say.

She cannot let it go. She leans towards me, whispering, “There is still the
other
gossip. I tried to tell you. A midwife has come forward to tell us that last autumn, around the time of your fifteenth birthday, she was summoned to the house of a nobleman somewhere in Hertfordshire, where a young woman of about your age, with long red-gold hair, gave birth to a healthy male child, which was taken from her.” She pauses so that I can take this in, because she has seen the look of incomprehension on my face. “It is said that you gave birth to Lord Seymour's son. There is a great scandal hanging over you, madam.”

She throws out her arms to me. She wants me to run to them and weep for the loss of my phantom son.

This is how it must have been for my mother when slander was heaped upon her head. Did she laugh in her strange way, or did she protest, as I do now?

“Lies,” I shout. I do not care who hears me. “All lies. I am as pure as the Virgin Mary. Or does London gossip think that I was chosen like her for a virgin birth?” I point my finger at her. “This has come from
you
, madam. Only a woman knows how such spiteful talk dishonours.”

“No, no, My Lady, it wasn't me. Who knows where such gossip begins?”

“But we know where it ends, don't we? It spills into the Thames and takes its victims to the Tower.” I am almost crying. “I shall write to my brother, demand that he denies this slander in public. If necessary, I shall ask to be examined by his physicians who will—”

She blushes. “How do you know of such things?” she asks.

“Needs must when the devil rides,” I reply. “This is how it was for my mother, accused of such scandal that she was glad to lose her head.” I can hardly control my rage. “Do you think that I would lie with the husband of the only woman who has ever been a true mother to me?”

“Did your mother not lie with her brother so that she could bear a son?” she asks.

The inkwell is within reach. It is in my hands before I know it and I throw its contents over Lady Tyrwhitt. Black ink spots her cheeks and neck, like moles. Some settles in the puckers of her lips, puckered from too much praying, from too much gossiping. She scuttles away. “Send up more ink,” I shout after her. “I must write to my brother
today
.” My voice echoes into the stairwell. “If I do not write,
who
will?”

“It will not be worth the ink,” she calls back. “There is already a confession from the Tower.”

My heart almost stops. “Whose confession?”

She shrugs. “You shall know tomorrow.”

When Blanche Parry comes to light the candles, she finds me kneeling. I have knelt so long that she has to lift me to my chair, as they did my father before he died. She rocks me as she used to rock my cradle, and I let her. She is all I have now.

At dusk, Lady Tyrwhitt remembers that she is here to soften me. She comes back. A deep ink spot still stains her left cheek, which she has tried to hide with white powder, and there is a fainter mark on her neck, half-hidden by her sapphire necklace. “We must not fight, Elizabeth, for we are stepsisters. Lady Catherine was also my stepmother. You know that she was married twice before she married your father?”

“So?”

“We should be friends if we are kin.”

I shudder. “I already have one half-sister,” I say, “and I have no need of another.”

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, the daughter of my father's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, with Spanish eyes as dark as mine so that we cannot read each other's thoughts, who hates my mother so much that the hatred spoils her once pretty face. Mary, who used to live with me here when I was young, always weeping with migraines and woman's pains.

It is more than a year since I saw her at Twelfth Night, frowning at me as she touched her crucifix as if to protect herself from the devil.

I dismiss Lady Tyrwhitt. Tomorrow, I face the devil – her husband. And he will hold my life in his jewelled hands.

Chapter Twenty-one

6 February, 1549

I did not sleep last night. A brutal wind blew the riders in from London – I noticed hoof prints in the snowy courtyard this morning. Every tree is touched with frost. The fountain where my mother cooled me shimmers with ice.

A confession – whether it is Kat's or Tom Seymour's – could decide whether I live or die.

This is how it must have been for my mother. I am glad that she had Alys to comfort her before she died.

Blanche Parry, my old nurse, does not know how to console me. “I've done nothing wrong. Neither has Kat,” I cry. “What if her poor body's been broken on the rack? What if they've pulled out her fingernails? What if Thomas Seymour's said—”

“Hush, I won't let them hurt you,” she murmurs. Her melodious voice soothes me for a while. Then Seymour's face flashes in front of me. He is not a man to sit in the Tower staring at death. I feel his beard brush against my neck. My voice rises to a scream. “My stepfather will say that I bewitched him as my mother did my father. And they'll believe him. Like mother, like daughter.”

Lady Tyrwhitt comes to fetch me early. We walk to the schoolroom in silence, taking the inside steps from the Great Hall, for she dislikes the snow on the garden steps. My tears are down to a trickle now, so light they could be taken for the gleam of sweat.